Marathon Oil Company Upgrades Visualization Center
with Next Generation Projection Technology

Marathon Oil Company, an integrated energy company, has operated a Panoram GVR series immersive visualization theater at their Houston, Texas, headquarters since January 2000. Referred to by the company as their "Visionarium," the theater accommodates up to 50 users and features a 27 ft. wide X 8 ft. high (8.1 X 2.4m) concave screen that is capable of displaying high-resolution images in an active matrix stereoscopic mode. The theater represents the core of what is known as their "Visionarium suite" which includes an adjacent conference room, a break room, two workrooms and a "pilot's" office. The Visionarium display is driven primarily by an SGI® Onyx™ 3200 computer and is used by Marathon in the process of exploring for oil and gas. It allows multi-disciplinary asset teams (including geophysicists, geologists, reservoir engineers, drilling experts and others) to view three-dimensional subsurface models and other data in a collaborative virtual reality environment.

The display system originally installed in the theater utilized analog CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) video projectors that, at the time, were state-of-the-art for stereoscopic applications. However, by mid-2002, a new stereoscopic projection technology had begun to emerge using digital DLP™ (Digital Light Processing) based on Texas Instruments' DMD™ (Digital Micromirror Device) technology. The benefits of digital over analog projection were clear - superior brightness, clarity, color accuracy and stability. About this time, Marathon recognized this performance differential and began exploring the possibility of upgrading their Visionarium.

"After three years of use, the CRT projectors were at the end of their natural life, appearing dim and blurry and requiring significant tuning," explains Sharon Crawford, Marathon's Supervisor of Computer Aided Interpretation, who directed the upgrade project. "Clearly, we needed to upgrade and we wanted the latest and the best value technology available."
Marathon began upgrading the system to digital projection in February of 2003. As the enabling technologies came out of the lab, additional components were added.

The upgrade involved changes to the system that extended far beyond simply swapping out the projectors. In fact, a whole new generation of image-processing electronics was required to handle the edge-blending between the three projected images. Also, while the CRT technology inherently allowed projected images to be aligned with great precision, the digital projectors required a new form of signal processing called "warping", which bends the image digitally, allowing the projectors to be aligned to each other and onto the curved screen.
Though digital projectors are brighter and sharper than CRT projectors, they are also substantially noisier and create vastly more heat. This can be a real issue in collaborative environments where the projectors are in the room with the users. Specialized new projector housings that dampen the noise were put to use in Marathon's new system. Protruding into the ceiling plenum, they use sophisticated temperature and safety monitoring systems as well as the ability to channel the heat directly through the HVAC system, reducing the extra cooling requirements to a highly localized issue.

Marathon replaced the theater's existing stretch fabric screen with a hard acrylic screen material. The new screen is designed to provide optimal performance with DLP projectors (which require less gain to maintain contrast ratios), and its firmness results in a more consistent image quality across the entire width of the screen.

The upgraded system also makes use of a special new signal processing technology from Panoram, called Extreme Bandwidth Scaling, that allows one-pipe SGI® Onyx™ computers to feed all three of the stereoscopic-capable digital projectors without modifying the computer configuration.

The upgrade, with full system functionality, including active matrix stereoscopic viewing on all three projectors, was completed in early May 2003. This model facility has now set the standard for the next generation of high-end VisCenters in the oil/gas industry.

"With the clarity, the resolution and the brightness of the new DLP projectors, we've really gained quite a bit with the upgrade," said Crawford. "The increased brightness of the new system allows us to bring up the lights, which is important for group interaction, especially when working with a partner. The increased sharpness and clarity also helps with understanding detail in the data and reduces fatigue."

Panoram offers special packages for owners of CRT-based visualization centers to upgrade their systems to digital technology, replacing the necessary components while keeping those that are still useful. Panoram also offers packages for new installations that are based on digital projection.